Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (25 page)

Another opponent of the court, Sir John Eliot, died in confinement at the end of 1632. The king’s enmity against him was such that, despite pleas for his health, he had never been allowed to leave the Tower in the course of his imprisonment. He had sent a petition to the king in which he declared that ‘by reason of the quality of the air I am fallen into a dangerous disease’; he also stated that ‘I am heartily sorry I have displeased your majesty’. The king replied that the petition was not humble enough. Eliot’s humiliation was continued after his death. His son petitioned the king to allow his father’s body to be carried into Cornwall for burial. Charles scrawled at the bottom of the petition, ‘Let Sir John Eliot’s body be buried in the church of that parish where he died.’ He was in other words to be interred in the Tower.

A sequence of letters between the members of the Barrington family, in the early months of 1632, gives the flavour of the time. Thomas Barrington, writing from Holborn, informs his mother that ‘women are cruel this year, Saturn reigns with strong influence: another wife has given her husband a potion of melted lead, but it was because he came home drunk’. His wife, Judith Barrington, wrote to her mother-in-law that ‘I find all my friends sick or dying, the air is so bad … Here is little news stirring, much expected at the latter end of this week … This day was the poor woman burned in Smithfield that poisoned her husband, which is wondered at the cruelty, since there was so much cause of mercy to her.’ A week or so later she reported that ‘the smallpox is so much here that we wish ourselves with you’. In May Thomas Barrington wrote that ‘the current of London runs so contrary and diverse courses as that we know not which way to fasten on certain truths’. London was the city of disease, of cruelty and of false reports.

In the spring of 1633 the king returned to his homeland. He made a leisurely journey northwards, and reached Edinburgh by the middle of June. His relations with Scotland in the past had not been entirely happy; at the beginning of his reign he had asked for the restitution of Church lands in Scotland to the Crown. The measure was not in the end advanced, but it stirred bad blood. When some Scottish lords came to defend the existing landowners, the king made a characteristic remark. ‘My lord,’ he said to the leader of the deputation, ‘it is better the subject suffer a little than all lie out of order.’ Charles himself did not seem especially to like the Scots and, in particular, the Highlanders, whom he described as ‘that race of people which in former times hath bred so many troubles’. Yet his principal feeling was one of indifference rather than hostility.

He was crowned as king of Scotland in Holyrood Abbey on 18 June, and it was remarked that he had been happy to wait eight years for the privilege. The delay showed no overriding desire to endear himself to his people. The coronation itself was marked of course by ritual and formal ceremony that did not impress the natives; for most Scots, brought up in the Presbyterian faith, it smacked of prelacy and popery.

One of the complaints advanced by the Scots concerned the introduction of English ritual into the service. Yet the chief proponent of that ritual was about to be raised to the highest see. When Bishop Laud came into the king’s presence for the first time after the journey to Scotland he was greeted with unfamiliar words. ‘My Lord’s Grace of Canterbury, you are very welcome.’ Charles had just heard of the death of George Abbot, the previous archbishop.

As bishop of London Laud had been the king’s principal religious adviser, but his authority had been ill-defined. Now as archbishop he became the source and spring of English religion, with an energy and purpose that the king himself lacked. Yet, at the beginning of his ministry, he was beset by anxiety. He wrote to Thomas Wentworth that ‘there is more expected from me than the craziness [infirmity] of these times will give me leave to do’. Nevertheless like Sisyphus he was ready to put his shoulder to the stone.

He was a man of quick temper, small in stature, inclined to irritability and impatient of contradiction. His harshness and rigour quickly made him enemies, particularly among the puritans whom he excoriated. He was known as ‘the shrimp’, ‘the little urchin’ and ‘the little meddling hocus-pocus’. The king’s fool, Archie, made a pun before a royal dinner. ‘Give great praise to God, and little laud to the Devil.’ Yet no one could question the new archbishop’s sincerity or personal honesty. One English diplomat, Sir Thomas Roe, told the queen of Bohemia that Laud was ‘very just, incorrupt … a rare counsellor for integrity’.

Thomas Carlyle described him as ‘a vehement, shrill voiced character confident in its own rectitude, as the narrowest character may the soonest be. A man not without affections, though bred as a college monk, with little room to develop them: of shrill, tremulous, partly feminine nature, capable of spasms, of most hysterical obstinacy, as female natures are.’ He was something between an Oxford don and a bureaucrat. A portrait of him by Van Dyck represents him as austere and quizzical. Not that he would have put much faith in the artist. He described his paintings as ‘vanity shadows’.

He was highly superstitious and kept a record of his uneasy dreams. He dreamed that he gave the king a drink in a silver cup; but Charles refused it, and called for a glass. He dreamed that the bishop of Lincoln jumped on a horse and rode away. On one night ‘I dreamed that I had the scurvy; and that forthwith all my teeth became loose. There was one in especial in my lower jaw, which I could scarcely keep in with my finger till I had called for help.’

Soon enough his influence was being felt. In October 1633 he and the king caused to be republished King James’s
Declaration of Sports
, which had granted a degree of entertainment and recreation on the Sabbath. The king’s ‘good people’ were not to be discouraged from dancing or archery, while the sports of leaping and vaulting were also permitted; ‘may-games, whit ale and morris dances, and the setting up of maypoles’ were perfectly acceptable to the authorities. It was almost like a return to the more picturesque religion of earlier centuries. For the Calvinists and the stricter sorts of Protestant, the
Declaration of Sports
was a poisoned document set to destroy true religion. Certainly it had unforeseen consequences. A seventeenth-century historian, Thomas Fuller, wrote that many of his contemporaries were ‘of opinion that this abuse of the Lord’s Day was a principal procurer of God’s anger, since poured out on this land, in a long and bloody civil war’. The vicar of Enmore in Somerset declared from the pulpit that ‘whatsoever the king is pleased to have done, the king of heaven commands us to keep the Sabbath’.

In the same period it was determined that the plain communion table should be moved from the middle of the church to the eastern end where it was to be railed off; it then more closely resembled the altars of the old faith. The priests now bowed towards it, and some of them employed the sign of the cross to bless it. William Prynne had already satirized the Eucharistic rite when the celebrant …

came near the bread, which was cut and laid in a fine napkin, and then he gently lifted up one of the corners of the said napkin, and peeping into it till he saw the bread (like a boy that peeped after a bird-nest in a bush), and presently clapped it down again, and flew back a step or two, and bowed very low three times towards it … then he laid his hand upon the gilt cup … so soon as he pulled the cup a little nearer to him he let it go, flew back and bowed again three times towards it.

This was a keen burlesque of the services imposed by Laud.

The archbishop was concerned to augment the beauty and holiness of the rites of the Church, thus inducing respect if not awe. He had previously complained that ‘’tis superstition nowadays for any man to come with more reverence into a church, than a tinker and his bitch into an alehouse’. It soon became a serious offence for a minister not to bow his head at the name of Jesus. Choirboys came in two by two, and were instructed never to turn their backs upon the altar. Music returned to the cathedrals.

Laudianism, however, was not popery. The archbishop had a distaste for Roman Catholicism that was quite genuine. He was hoping to create a truly national Church devoid of the zealotry and intolerance of the puritans as well as the Mariolatry and superstitions of the papists. He had no appetite or aptitude for theological argument and, on the everlasting debate between free will and predestination, he said only that ‘something about these controversies is unmasterable in this life’. He was indifferent towards Geneva and Rome, and looked only towards the king.

Laud was also attempting to fashion religious developments of a structural kind; he appointed only bishops who were of firmly anti-Calvinist persuasion. Charles himself believed that the episcopacy was the fundamental buttress of his sovereignty; no bishop, as his father had said, implied no king. It was believed essential to augment clerical power. The corporations of cathedral towns were called upon to appoint more clerics as justices of the peace, and were further obliged to attend Sunday service in their ceremonial robes. Within a short time Laud was joined by two bishops in the king’s council; Bishop Juxon of London, who had been only the king’s chaplain two years before, was appointed as lord treasurer of the kingdom. The last cleric to fill the post had been promoted in the reign of Henry VII (1485–1509). England might be considered to have re-entered the world of medieval polity.

A series of ‘visitations’ to the various parishes followed in order to investigate cases of clerical disobedience and nonconformity. In Manchester, for example, twenty-seven clerics were charged with failing to kneel at the time of communion. Richard Mather of Toxteth, near Liverpool, admitted that he had never worn the surplice. ‘What!’ exclaimed the Visitor, ‘Preach fifteen years and never wear a surplice? It had been better for him that he had gotten seven bastards!’

The old processions and festivals also returned. With the republication of
Declaration of Sports
came a general relaxation of social custom. The ritual of ‘beating the bounds’ was soon followed by the parishes of London; such holy days as All Saints were celebrated once more. The custom of the Lord of Misrule returned with its attendant atmosphere of party games, dancing and drinking of spiced ale. These feasts had never completely died away but, in the new atmosphere of anti-puritanism, they flourished.

*   *   *

The king was further to test the loyalty of the nation. In the autumn of 1634 writs of ship-money were issued once again, for the first time in a period of peace. They had previously been sent out in 1626 and 1627, in the face of a threat of war against both France and Spain; payments had been grudging, but they had been made, and so it was deemed plausible to repeat the exercise. The proximate cause for the reintroduction of the tax was the prospect of new combinations in Europe. The French and Dutch had entered an unlikely alliance to dominate the continent, and a secret treaty between England and Spain was believed to be necessary.

There was no hope, however, that the members of the king’s own council would countenance the fact of an English force taking the part of Spain against the Dutch; how could the king ally himself with the pre-eminent Catholic power attacking a Protestant republic? Once again Charles relied upon intrigue with any or every party that seemed likely to favour him. He had to conceal his alliance with Spain and pretend that the ships were being prepared as a defence against attacks from all quarters. It was said that English trade had to be protected from Tunis and Turkey as much as from France or Spain. So the king claimed the right of sovereignty in all of his seas, including the English Channel and the North Sea.

The first writs of ship-money were dispatched only to the ports and to the towns along the coasts; they were ordered to provide a sum sufficient to fit out a certain number of ships as well as to maintain them and their crews for six months. The money was to be given to a collector appointed by the Crown. London alone attempted to oppose the tax, having been required to raise one fifth of the total, but was quickly subdued by threats and talk of treason. The Venetian ambassador commented of ship-money that ‘if it does not altogether violate the laws of the realm, as some think it does, it is certainly repugnant to usage and to the forms hitherto observed’.

Yet for what purpose was the fleet being prepared? What was the king to do with his newly fitted ships? Was it enough that they should enforce his sovereignty of the seas by making sure that passing vessels struck their flags and lowered their topsails? In the spring of 1635 the first fleet raised by ship-money finally took sail. The forty-two vessels, nineteen of them over 50 tons, set forth with orders to curb piracy, protect English traders, prevent the Dutch from fishing in English waters and, according to one news-writer, Edward Rossingham, ‘to preserve the sovereignty of the narrow seas from the French king who hath a design long to take it from us and therefore he hath provided a very great navy’. They were meant, in other words, to do everything and nothing.

So ship-money had indeed been raised, out of fear or loyalty, and the success of the tax ensured its survival; in the following year it was enlarged to take in the whole country. It was argued that, since the counties and urban corporations were interested in their ‘honour, safety and profit’, it was appropriate that ‘they should all put to their helping hands’. The appeal worked, and the tax of 1635 became the model for the next five years in which 80 per cent of the money demanded was actually paid.

In 1634 the first hackney carriages were allowed to stand for hire in the streets of London, a novelty that generated the usual amount of horror and indignation. It was proposed that no hackney could be hired for a journey of less than 3 miles. The suggestion was accepted on the grounds that too many coaches going on brief expeditions would create a ‘lock’ or traffic-jam in the streets, damage the pavements and increase the price of hay. Other contemporaries suggested that no unmarried gentleman should be allowed to ride in a hackney carriage without being accompanied by his parents.